OK：世界を席巻したつづりのジョーク

"OK" may be the most widely used word on the planet. People say it in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and dozens of other languages. But it started out as a silly joke in an American newspaper. In the late 1830s, young people in Boston had a strange hobby. They loved making up abbreviations for deliberately misspelled phrases. "OW" stood for "oll wright" (all right), and "KY" stood for "know yuse" (no use). It was the kind of joke that only made sense if you were in on it. On 23 March 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed "o.k." as short for "oll korrect" – a joke spelling of "all correct". Most of these abbreviations disappeared quickly, but OK got lucky. The next year, in 1840, President Martin Van Buren was running for re-election. He came from a town called Kinderhook in New York, and his supporters nicknamed him "Old Kinderhook". They formed "OK Clubs" and used OK as a campaign slogan. Van Buren lost the election, but the word won. OK spread across the United States, and then around the world. For a long time, nobody knew where OK really came from, and people suggested all sorts of explanations. It was only in the 1960s that an American language expert, Allen Walker Read, tracked down the old newspapers and solved the mystery. So OK began as a misspelling, became a political slogan and ended up as one of the most useful words in the world. Not bad for a joke.